De la Isla: Supreme Court's diversity matters

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor signs copies of her book after speaking at The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, California January 28, 2013. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith (UNITED STATES - Tags: POLITICS CRIME LAW) - RTR3D3M0

WASHINGTON — When Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel introduced Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was promoting her autobiographical bestseller “My Beloved World” at the Chicago Public Library on Jan. 30, he looked over an audience of 500 people. Two hundred more had been turned away.

“I don’t know of another justice who would get this kind of turnout,” Emanuel said. “She has brought a heartbeat to the Supreme Court.”

A month later, Sotomayor’s own heart was ticking like a Timex and giving a licking when the court’s decision came down on the case of Bongani Charles Calhoun.

The black defendant had been charged with meeting others in a hotel room to take part in a drug conspiracy. He’d said he didn’t know a drug transaction was planned. A federal prosecutor had explained to a jury, “You’ve got African-Americans,” he said, “you’ve got Hispanics, you’ve got a bag full of money. Does that tell you — a light bulb doesn’t go off in your head and say, ‘This is a drug deal?’ “

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Calhoun’s lawyer had failed to object to the racial reference, and the issue was not raised in his appeal.

Sotomayor, joined by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, wrote a statement voicing a powerful objection. “The prosecutor here tapped a deep and sorry vein of racial prejudice that has run through the history of criminal justice in our nation,” it said. The government attorney had tried to “substitute racial stereotype for evidence and racial prejudice for reason.”

Her rare statement was intended to “dispel any doubt” that the court’s action could “be understood to signal our tolerance of a federal prosecutor’s racially charged remark. It should not.”

This is what judicial courage looks like — as was what followed.

Two days later, Antonin Scalia, the court’s longest-serving justice, argued that just because the Voting Rights Act was renewed in 2006 by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House, it did not mean Congress actually supported the law.

Its Section 5 requires nine states and many other jurisdictions -- most in the South but also in parts of the Bronx in New York -- to get federal preclearance when they want to change their voting laws.

Scalia said lawmakers overwhelmingly voted for it because they were secretly afraid to vote against “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”

In a breach of decorum, Justice Elena Kagan interrupted Scalia’s questioning of counsel to argue that 98 senators decided there was “a continuing need for this piece of legislation.”

Sotomayor questioned the Alabama lawyer’s argument to overturn the law. “Your county pretty much hasn’t (changed),” she charged. Why should the Supreme Court “vote in favor of a county whose record is the epitome of what caused the passage of this law to start with?”

Sotomayor has a first-hand understanding of this. She is from the Bronx, where the law applies, and has lived in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory where the people are not allowed to vote in presidential elections.

Isn’t this why she is on the court, to apply her experience in life and the law to her decisions? It brings into question: Where was Justice Clarence Thomas in all this? Since 2006, he has only spoken in open court once — in January, when he made a short quip about a lawyer. Wasn’t he supposed to bring his voice to the court?

Or should Scalia brush up on civil rights history -- or resign like Pope Benedict XVI? Those suggestions came from Ana GarcÝa-Ashley, executive director of the interfaith, interracial Gamaliel Foundation, in a recent Huffington Post blog post.

In Chicago, Sotomayor expressed the value of true equality in the United States when she greeted and hugged audience members who’d watched her presentation via TV monitors in an overflow room: “There are so many differences among us, but what is important is our commonality.”

Sometimes it’s not enough to love your country. You have to love the people and argue like a demon with lawyers and judges about higher legal and practical values.